Greedy Goblin

Friday, July 8, 2016

BDO wealth guide without mob grinding from a top rich in Jordine

Black desert forums and reddit are full of tears and asks for help of poor people. Their bottom line is that they grind, but they are still poor and very behind in gear. To my eternal sadness, people honestly advise them to grind harder. Grinding mobs again and again and again isn't just the most horrible thing you can do with your leasure time, but it's also a very ineffective way to get gear.

Why? Because BDO isn't WoW, it's economy is more like EVE: you don't get upgrades from killing big bad bosses, you get them from a crafting method called "enchanting" and for that you need materials that cost lot of money. If you have no money, you have no gear. If you have no gear, you will grind very slowly.

This guide is written for absolute beginners, but anyone who realized that grinding Sausans and Pirates is not the best way of using his free time can use it and get rich much faster. How rich?

Your journey start as every others, you create your main, struggle with the default controls until you finish the basic quests (where they are needed). After you finish your second "combo guide", you can change the controls for something usable. Familiarize yourself with the game, keep questing until you are tasked to kill Red Nose. Don't attempt that, go to Velia instead (town just east from the spot where Red Nose should be summoned). There you get more quests. Make sure that you allow "life quests", "other quests" and repeatable quest in the top right bar of the quest window. Do what's easy combat or not requiring combat.

You'll soon reach the point when you can't 1-2 shot monsters. Instead of dancing around them and running from the elite ones (called Violent, Sturdy, Slayer and whatnot), realize that in BDO your power is very much dependent on your gear. And gear is something you don't have. Many of your slots are empty. Others have some white stuff. Even if you got lucky and have a green, it's "unenchanted". At the bottom of your inventory screen there are two values, AP (attack power) and DP (defense). They will be 10-20. They should be over hundred and you could oneshot Red Nose and continue the main questline. Visit the marketplace and select weapons or armor and you see various goodies. Many of them have a number on them like +8, +12 up to +15. They are very powerful and cost over ten million silver. You have like five thousand. You feel like you'll never have that money. I make that money in a day with less than half an hour active playing (pushing buttons). You can do that too! I won't lie, I played more (alchemy is quite a timesink), because to be on the toplist, this guide is not enough. But you don't want to be top rich, just want to be able to support yourself.

In the top left corner you see several "XP bars". The top is the main combat level. Below you can see the combat skillpoint bar. The next is your energy. The bottom one is the "contribution points". This should be your main stat, this will be the focus of your gameplay. Currently it's a couple dozen, which is few, but far from useless. Soon you'll be rich using them. North of Velia, there is a "node" called Bartali Farm. Nodes are areas of the game world and managed from an NPC or object called "node manager". Go to the farm and find the node manager. If you already explored the zone, you can open the map and right-click its icon and you'll be autorunning there.

Talk to the node manager and select "Node management". In the top left corner click on "invest" and the node is active. In the minimap opened you see two "work nodes", which belong to this node. A potato farm and a chicken hatchery. Select both and invest into them too. By doing so you use your contribution points to get access to these resources. Go back to Velia to Santo Manzi. You can find him selecting the "NPC search" button on the top of the screen and selecting "Worker". Talk to Santo Manzi and select "contract worker". For 5 energies, you are offered a worker. If it's a "naive worker", reject it. If it's a green human or goblin, take it. If it's blue, yellow or orange, take it if you have the silver for it. If you did a quest that gave you a "worker contract", trash it, it gives naive worker. Now you have a worker. Select the world map, click on Bartali Farm, click on the potato and send the worker to harvest potato (the picture shows another node):

You need another worker for the chickens, but you can't get it because you have no lodging. Go to the world map and select Velia. In the menu select "lodging". Some houses get highlighted. Click on one and buy it for lodging. It costs contribution points and silver. Some can be leveled up, that costs only silver. Now you can contract another worker and get the chickens:

Do you still have contribution points and silver? To the west of Velia, there is Finto Farm, with more potato and chicken. Repeat what you just did and connect them. Do you have more? Toscani farm with 2x Corn is your node. To connect that, you need to first connect Marino Farm, which is a useless node, but needed to have a chain back to Velia.

What will these nodes and workers do? Collect resources and place them to the storage of Velia. You can find it in the NPC search menu, storage. It takes time to gather enough resources. If you got enough of playing, just leave the computer running for a while. Important! The workers stop working if you close the game. Keep BDO running every time you can. Just minimize the game while doing something else. You also collect energy while being AFK. If you want to continue playing, skip the next two paragraphs and return to them when you no longer want to play actively!

OK, so you've been AFK for a few hours and you have potato, chicken, eggs, maybe corn. If you had lots of contribution points, you have other resources too (I'd suggest Forest of Seclusion and Ancient Stone Chamber. Activating the lasts costs energy). What to do with them? You can sell them for money! This is how you'll get rich! Click the marketplace icon in the warehouse interface and right-click a resource except potato and corn. It gives a little calculator asking how many you want to sell. Click "F" (full) and all your resources get to the marketplace interface (unless you have more than one sellable batch, usually 500). You now have to select a price. There are three possibilities:

There isn't any or only a few items are on the marketplace (see the yellow circle on the example picture below). This case the item is wanted by many and you should press max, confirm and sell. Eggs is a typical item for that category.

There are many items on the marketplace and the automatically offered price is higher than the minimum (green and red). This case type in a number smaller than the automatic (you can just decrease by one) to be the cheapest and people buy your wares. The example picture shows such wares.

There are many items on the marketplace and the offered price is already the minimum (green = red). This case the item is overabundance. Copper ore, Ash timber usually are. If you list for the minimum price, you will have to wait for long to sell. Instead, pull the item to your inventory, walk to the nearest vendor and sell it to him. If you have excavation materials from Ancient Stone Chamber, you can only sell it to the vendor. Little, but instant money.

Now grab the corn and the potato and go to the cooking vendor (NPC search, cooking. Buy 100 sugar, 200 leavening agent, 600 mineral water and a cooking utensil). In the main map - like you would buy lodging - select an available house for residence. Just make sure that it can't be used for lodging, that would be a waste! Upon buying a residence, below your XP bars you'll see a house icon. Click it and select the house in Velia to autorun to it. Activate the door, walk in and select "placement mode" to place the utensil. Leave placement mode by ESC and activate the utensil. Place 5 corn or potato, 1 sugar, 2 leavening agent and 6 mineral water into the cauldron and press continuous cooking. Select F for the counter again. Now you're cooking beer. Beer is needed for the workers and you should always have beer in your inventory. From time to time, select the worker icon, replenish all, select beer, confirm, repeat all.

OK, you ran out of contribution points and you are still poor, since you only listed a few items and most of them didn't sell. You understand that from now on these workers will make you items with no more input than beer management and listing the items from the storage, but it doesn't help you now. This is where the inpatient M&S fails. Since he wants progress now, he grinds harder. You are hopefully not like them. So what shall you do now?

Start an alt! Preferably the same class as the main, since you can use the knowledge learned from questing with him. Start playing with this alt and do the starter quests and the near Velia quests again. You will see that the quests give contribution points. When enough arrived, activate another node and get more workers. Also, this time write down if items like iron ore is needed for a quest. It will help to make the next alt level even faster. This seems repetitive and it is. But every alternative is even more repetitive (daily quests) and provide less contribution points. Not to mention that you don't even have access to them yet.

From time to time check the marketplace for items sold and collect the silver. Silver has weight, don't run around with a lot, keep it in the storage, you can use it for purchases in the town. From time to time also check your workers for need of beer. If you run out of beer, craft. If you have lots of energy, go to the Worker NPC (Santo Manzi in Velia) and ask for workers. This time take only yellow and orange. If you get one, fire an old green or blue and place the new one in his place.

By running alts you sooner or later run out of lodging in Velia. You can get 2 more in Toscani Farm and 3 from the item shop if you want to throw money at the problem, but you'll still be running out. There are many nodes and only a few lodging. This case go back to Olvia and connect nodes from there. Workers can go long distances, though this decreases their speed of work. Products of Olvia workers will spawn in the Olvia storage and there isn't a marketplace in Olvia. No problem, if you connect the nodes of the two towns, you can use the transport feature and NPCs will move your stuff to Velia:

Once a day cancel all the orders that didn't sell and relist them. Unlike with the first time listing, if the item in the second category (many others, automatic price above minimum), don't just go 1 point below it. Cut deeper, since the competition clearly went under you. You can only sell if the price you want is low enough for them to let you be and not undercut.

Are you having 5 alts all done Velia? It took a few days. Check your wallet and you realize that you have millions. Time to go shopping! You can buy greens to every slot, including accessories and you can buy an enchanted weapon. You should be able to buy a +12 if available. Using that, you'll be oneshotting the monsters and can defeat Red Nose easily. Continue questing with your main and soon you'll be sent to Heidel. Questing around Heidel will once again gets you to the point where monsters don't die so fast. Go back to Velia, place your gear to the storage. Log in the first alt, take the gear out and using the gear, do the Heidel quests again. This will generate enough contribution points to connect the Heidel nodes.

To make inventory management easier, you can now afford a cart which you can use to offline-transport goods to your new base: Heidel. This base will need lots of storage which you can buy via houses from contribution and from the item shop (storage is cheap in the item shop). Just select an alt which you are not leveling the moment, buy the wagon from the marketplace, register it at the stables, take it out and select "disconnect" from the ESC menu. Click on the "transport" icon, select the town you want to go and the character you want to play. The one with the cart will log off, the next one logs in and while you play, the first one reaches its target in an hour. Fill the cart and offline travel back to Heidel where you fill the stuff to the storage and list it for sale.

By the time you done the Heidel quests with all your alts, you have enough money to deck yourself out with a bunch of high level gear. You most probably can afford a +15 weapon too. Which is nice, considering you aren't even lvl 30. Off you go to Glish where new quests and new nodes await. Then Calpheon, Keplan, Trent. By the time you hit 50, you'll have 300 AP+DP and a couple ten millions in the bank. When you reach 250 contribution points, the contribution gain is badly penalized and there is no point leveling the alts anymore. They can be used for offline cart transportation. Your "grind" is over, from now on, your workers will supply you with income (about 10M for 20-30 mins inventory and market window management) without any grinding as long as you keep playing.

8 comments:

Little side-note for the boss scrolls offered by Black Spirit - if you die to the boss, you don't lose anything (just corpse run) and the boss doesn't reset the HP. So even if you suck completely, you'll win in the end :)